Eric Simpson2013-05-21T04:57:26-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=eric-simpsonCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Eric SimpsonGood old fashioned elbow grease.The Purpose of Marriage is Not Procreationtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29730612013-04-01T22:17:59-04:002013-04-01T22:22:41-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/Manhattan Declaration, the notion that marriage is structured around procreation is taken as axiomatic. In the Christian tradition, however, the meaning of marriage is more than an open question, and certainly not as dogmatic as they make it seem.
In the Manhattan Declaration, a pronouncement signed by Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy and laity alike, they allude to "Christian tradition" as dogmatically expressing the notion that the purpose of marriage is to sanction the sexual act for the purpose of procreation. Having children, therefore, is the fulfillment and meaning of marriage.
A natural response is to ask about the legitimacy of marriages for infertile couples, given the assumption that procreation both defines and fulfills marriage, and the Declaration has an answer. The marital commitment between a man and a woman, they claim, is consummated by a single purpose, which is expressed by "fulfilling together the behavioral conditions of procreation" (emphasis mine). In other words, marriage is to be structured around having sex in order to procreate, whether you can actually procreate or not, which legitimizes sex within the marriage.
So, according to the signers of the Declaration who come from these three very disparate traditions, Christianity teaches that even if you know that as a couple you cannot have children, as long as your marriage is structured around the desire to have children through sexual intercourse (i.e., as long as you have the right structure, the results are unimportant), your marriage is sanctioned according to its purpose even if you cannot possibly fulfill its purpose. Quickly, such reasoning dissolves into nonsense.
One might argue in response, tongue-in-cheek, that rather than defending the "Christian institution of marriage" from the legalization of same-sex unions, it opens the door. Any same-sex couple who agrees to behave as an infertile couple, structuring their marriage around sex, and sex around an impossible procreative act, can therefore make their marriage legitimate in the eyes of the Church as well. Narrowly defining behavioral conditions in terms of genitalia quickly can be reduced to absurdity whether we are talking about an infertile couple, or two members of the same sex. At the very least, the contorted logic encourages cognitive dissonance for infertile couples if not outright irrationality.
Fortunately, it isn't necessary to further twist logic in convoluted arguments because there is no conciliar dogmatic pronouncement on the subject, and it is not, contrary to what is inferred in the Manhattan Declaration, a dogma, such as is, say, the dogma of the Trinity, or of the two natures of Christ. Secondly, many recognized theologians and laity throughout history and in many different Christian communions today have a very different perspective.
I'm most familiar with the Orthodox Church, of which I am a member. I agree with the noted Orthodox theologian, Paul Evdokimov, who writes, "Both the preservation of the species and selfish sexual pleasure reduce the partner to a mere tool and destroy his dignity. Love alone bestows a spiritual meaning upon marriage, and justifies it by elevating it to perceive the countenance of the beloved in God, to the level of the one and only icon..."
According to my understanding of the Orthodox view, the purpose of marriage is not motivated by survival of the species, the urge or mandate to procreate, nor merely to enjoy the pleasures of sex. While both procreation and sexual enjoyment are of course present in most marriages, they do not define what it means to become "one flesh." Rather, this unity of purpose between two persons, which has historically been between males and females, retains its purpose, and therefore its significance, in the mutual progression towards personal transformation and salvation. This is the mystery of marriage within the context of the Orthodox Church. Other perspectives, such as marriage as a convenient contractual arrangement, are socially constructed and derived. The Church takes the vehicle of the social construct, such as marriage (in this instance), retains its value and elevates it to a higher purpose. To confuse the sacrament with the vehicle is like confusing the Eucharistic gift with bread sold on the shelf at the local supermarket. Evdokimov continues:
"Man and woman move toward one another by 'mutually getting to know each other,' by revealing themselves to each other for a shared ascent; nothing comes to ennoble or legitimize, still less to 'pardon' this meaning that royally imposes itself before, or even independent of, procreation....It is from this overflowing fullness that the child can come as fruit, but it is not procreation that determines and establishes the value of marriage. St. John Chrysostom says: 'When there is no child, will they not be two? Most certainly, for their coming together has this effect, it diffuses and commingles the bodies of both. And as one who has cast ointment into oil, who has made the whole one, so in truth it is also here.' '...Marriage is the intimate union of two lives, ' 'the sacrament of love.'"
Love is therefore the unitive factor in marriage, and not the structure of sexual compatibility nor the capacity to produce offspring. The 19th Century Russian writer (and friend of Dostoevsky), Vladimir Solovyov, reiterates the point. In an essay titled, "Beauty, Sexuality and Love" he writes, "The meaning of sexual love is generally supposed to consist in subserving the propagation of the species. I consider this view to be mistaken -- not on the ground of any ideal considerations as such, but first and foremost on ground of natural history."
Solovyov's appeal to nature is at least as compelling as that of those who would argue that same sex unions are immoral due to a contrariness to nature. He first makes the point that sex is not necessary for reproduction, which may be witnessed in processes such as cellular division, sporing and budding, both in vegetable life and in lower animal life forms. Given this, Solovyov posits that "...among animals that reproduce themselves solely in the sexual way (the vertebrates), the higher we go in the organic scale, the more limited is the power of reproduction and the greater the force of sexual attraction" and that therefore ""sexual love and reproduction of the species are in inverse proportion to each other: the stronger the one, the weaker the other....until at last, in man, there may be intense sexual love without any reproduction whatever."
The meaning of sexual reproduction among higher organisms therefore through mutual desire and love brings into being a greater range of meaning and significance than the singular, instinctual purpose of propagation, but rather the same mystery that unites Christ to his bride, the Church, which is love.]]>Confessions of an Aging Student: Returning to College in My 40'stag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29770272013-04-01T16:02:51-04:002013-04-01T16:05:58-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
In fact, my adventures included, somewhere along the way, meeting my wife, marrying my wife, having children, divorcing my wife, remarrying my wife, and having more children. My freewheeling days as a self-styled American vagabond were short-lived. Life is hard. After working for more than a year trading currencies online from a home computer, and losing everything, I threw up my hands. It was time to go back to school. My fifteen-year hiatus was over.
I admit I was a bit nervous. I didn't realize that I was part of a trend at the time of older students returning to college. I imagined being the pariah in the corner of the classroom, the "old man" as compared to the 19-year-old, fresh-faced freshmen. Still an undergraduate, I wasn't sure how many of my former credits would transfer. A former English major who planned an emphasis in creative writing the first time I went to college (not counting my tenure at Bible college in the late '80s), my objectives had shifted.
The justification for going back to college was to be more employable. My wife encouraged me to pursue something in computers. I hesitated, but then thought, well, maybe emerging media, where I could satisfy my creative impulses. My counselor, however, sensing that I was really not interested in computers or even emerging media, warned me of all the young, competitive, smart kids out there who grew up on the Internet, unlike me, and suggested I pursue a field I am actually interested in. I acquiesced very easily. Balancing pragmatic concerns with genuine interests is no easy task for me, since the two, unfortunately, rarely merge.
So how would it be, I wondered, sitting in a classroom with all of these kids who could really actually be my kids, had my life taken a completely different turn when I was 20 or so (my first child, a son, was not born until I was 34, and my third and last child, a daughter, was not born until I was 42). I projected my own sense of failure into an imaginary room, chastising myself, comparing myself to others, like, for instance, the President of the United States, who, when he was my age, was successfully running for the Presidency of the United States. All right, so maybe I have high standards.
My younger brother, a successful Ph.D., and an economist (who also volunteered to very generously help foot some of the expenses for my return to college), assured me that in his classrooms the older students are usually a welcome contribution. I wasn't so sure.
Fortunately, while I did find myself in the minority, I did not find myself alone. At first, I thought that the high numbers of returning older students was just a panicked reaction to job loss due to the Great Recession. I'm sure in many instances that this is absolutely the case. But it turns out that the phenomenon of returning older students is a trend that has been going on for a while, including retirement age college students and graduates in their 70's. This is due partly to a shift in the population where there are more older people than younger college-age people. It is also due, obviously, to a weak economy, even though constantly rising and exorbitant tuition and other associated costs (for instance, when you have to pay $185 for a required 200-page trade paperback, this is a sign that something isn't quite right in the land of academia) and incurred debt may ultimately make it an unwise choice for some people.
In the '90s, I was accepted to the University of California in Berkeley, a well-known institution fondly referred to by the locals as "Cal", but other than a summer class in Russian language that I dropped, I never really started there. This time around I found myself at the closest institute of higher learning I could find, one of the best kept secrets in the state, Southern Oregon University, nestled in Shakespeare country, the somewhat small community of Ashland, known for its theater. Classes are small. The instructors are committed, or should be. And while the weight of the student body population are much younger than me, no one really seems to care. My misbegotten fears have largely been forgotten.
Of course, my experience of college, like those of my nontraditional cohorts, does not reflect this time the popular cliches, dorm life, drinking binges or the making of lifelong friends. That experience is long irretrievable for me. Rather, it has an aura of metanoia to it (the Greek word for repentance), sort of akin to the humility mixed with courage one might feel when embarking on a second or third marriage. I do not go to club meetings or parties after class.
I work (I retain my contract job as a writer of online content, not in this venue obviously, to help pay bills.) Then I go home, spend some time with my family and maybe a couple of hours getting my three children to go to bed, which takes more effort than it feels like it should.
But this time around I feel oddly more receptive to the whole process, more aware of what I am learning and why. I am surprised at how exciting and stimulating an education can be. I am also far more directed in my purpose. I have become what my peers in high school used to disdainfully call "a straight arrow."
Whereas I felt a bit lost when it came to academic pursuits previously, I have more of an idea of what I am doing now, and am less embarrassed by my own ambitions. It's come a bit late, sure. But you know the old aphorism, so I won't repeat it here. Do I wish I had this kind of insight 18 or 20 years ago? You bet. Is returning to college in my 40s an unwise choice? I'll let you know in a couple of years. Right now, however, it seems right.]]>Learning to Give During Difficult Timestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16567182012-07-16T01:05:28-04:002012-09-14T05:12:02-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
Twenty years ago I lived in my first studio apartment in southern California in a run-down neighborhood. The apartment had thin walls and cockroaches. I worked swing-shift by myself running a plastic blow-molding machine, making about 5000 poly-collars (some kind of plumbing device) per night. This was the kind of job my degree in theology had secured for me, but it was all right for the moment.
One night I came home to find a bombed-out car, still smoking, in front of the apartment complex. (This was a few months before rioting would occur in the wake of the Rodney King verdict.) I slept on an old couch (it was a "furnished" apartment) across from my two huge bookcases filled with Calvinist and Reformed theology books, the sum of my possessions. I listened to KFI talk radio every night at work. I did not own a television. This was still a couple of years before the world wide web would take off.
I had stopped attending any kind of church, though I was fresh from working at a Bible College. I had yet to discover the Orthodox Church, which I finally made my home a few years later. I had been more or less a fundamentalist Christian for about seven years, and was feeling a little burned out. I was still single, very young, and beginning to feel jaded. At the time, I decided, however, to pray that God, in his providence, would arrange for me to help someone in need at least once a day.
I had been thinking a lot at the time about human dignity and what that really meant. My meditation was on the passage in the epistle of James, which says that "pure and undefiled religion is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself un-spotted from the world." All in all, it seemed a bit more practical than all the theology I had spent the previous few years ingesting. Religion, the text seemed to imply, is about serving those in need, and for an example, the writer chose those who were the most vulnerable -- children and widows with no one to protect them. This sentiment follows a longer section in which James also says that faith without works is dead, and, "Show me your faith without works, and I will show you my faith by my works." I was motivated to get my "religion" out of my head and into the streets. Literally.
As it turned out, about once a day I would find somebody in need and assist them. Small things cropped up, usually while driving. Many people needed gas, or their car battery jumped (I ended up buying a gas can and a pair of jumper cables that I carried around with me), and so on; circumstance provided another person in need daily for about eight weeks straight. The prayer was being answered, but I thought to myself, "This isn't necessarily being arranged by God or by his providence. I am just unconsciously or even consciously, actively looking for people to help and making myself more available." I thought this, but continued to pray that at least once a day, someone would need what small help I could offer.
One night after my swing shift I decided I was just going to forgo the whole experiment, drop by a convenience store, buy some beer and get drunk. After work I drove around for a bit, then stopped at the first convenience store I saw, one that I had never been to before, and went in, grabbed a six-pack of beer, and took it to the counter.
The guy behind the counter hung up a phone, a stricken look on his face. "My wife just left me," he said.
"Oh no," I said. probably not very convincingly. I had never been married or dumped. I got out my wallet.
"I can't believe it," he said. "She just called and told me she had packed and is going out the door this minute."
"That's terrible," I said. "I'm sorry."
He put his hands down on the counter, trembling, and began to talk, and I began to listen. No one came in the store, and for about 30 minutes he told me his troubles. I listened, and consoled him the best I could. I didn't offer any advice, thankfully, because I didn't have any to give. I was just a pair of ears, there at the right time.
Since this is a true story, nothing miraculous happened to give it a sense of closure like you might see in the movies or hear in a three point sermon. The guy and I did not become friends. I never saw him again. His wife likely left him and he was likely miserable. Maybe, hopefully, my presence for 30 minutes as a listening ear was helpful for what it was in that moment. But it was something, and it was, oddly enough, as the cliche has it, my "good deed for the day" on a day in which I had decided to do nothing.
Perhaps the answer to my prayers wasn't all entirely of my own making. Maybe providence is more about both sides working together -- my own volition and availability in cooperation with that which is well beyond my control.
Time passed and my life circumstances changed and I moved and stopped my conscious experiment. But recently I have been thinking about taking it up again, and wondering if others will join me. It seemed personally relevant in a city that, a few months later, was burning.
It is just as relevant now in continually difficult economic times. The threat of scarcity, combined with mimetic desire, motivates many people (not all) to be less charitable, to hold on to what they have in the fear they will lose it. Many prosecutors are more fierce, many landlords less flexible. Millions of Christians vocally promote a false gospel of selfishness and greed, rather than one of loving one's neighbor, wrapped in an ideology of "liberty" that is rooted absolutely in self-interest. Rather than grace, religious leaders preach judgment, and justify hatred in a convoluted logic that resembles a grandiose persecution complex.
None of this should be the case. Economic hardship is an opportunity to truly give, not only from our own abundance, but from our own poverty -- even if it's just a gallon of gas, or some attention to someone who needs it. So I wonder if anyone will join me in deciding to be useful in a way that isn't normal for us at least once a day, to go out of our way to help someone else. Circumstances, or providence, provides the opportunity. "It's more blessed to give than to receive," said Jesus, according to St. Paul. Simply put, he's right. All we need to do is make ourselves available.]]>The Beatitudes are Essential and Relevant Todaytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16402032012-07-10T14:32:00-04:002012-09-09T05:12:04-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
Maybe one of the problems is that the Beatitudes seem strange and even sappy to contemporary ears, or as small comforts to big problems. Another may be that few Christians, including myself, are able to even begin to live according to them.
But in the last couple of years as I have studied the Beatitudes more carefully, and as I keep knocking and seeking and pressing in to understand them, I keep finding new and extraordinary dimensions of meaning and significance. I have read some commentators who claim that they are rules that Jesus gave to show an ideal no one can achieve, but I don't buy it. I mean, I agree with the sentiment, but I don't buy the idea that this was the purpose that Jesus had in mind when he gave the Sermon on the Mount.
From my perspective, the Beatitudes are the essence, the lifeblood and beating heart of authentic, ancient and living Christianity. Here they are (from Mt 5:3-10):
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Over a period of time I have written about some of my reflections on each Beatitude, some with more insight than others, here at the Huffington Post. I have also talked about them one by one on my professionally-produced podcast, "Seeking Peace."
Looking at the Beatitudes as a kind of ladder, an ascent, I have discovered some amazing things about spirituality and its fundamental relationship to the world. The Beatitudes have intense significance in a world where many Christians want to change others and the world from the top down, through forced conformity rather than genuine conversion.
The Beatitudes express the idea that peace comes from peacemakers who are characterized by their poverty of spirit, their ability to mourn for the world, their lack of attachments or clinging to personal rights, their hunger for the healing of the world, their extreme mercy extended even towards their worst enemies, and their purity of heart. Peacemakers, according to Christ, are the instruments who bring peace to the world because they exemplify these characteristics. Change comes from the inside and moves towards the external. Peacemakers are persecuted because they present a challenge to authority which compels from the outside but cannot penetrate the interior.
No one is persecuted for Christ's sake because of their political ideology, or their moral position on some behavior, as if Jesus were a theorist like Ayn Rand or Karl Marx and Christianity just another system of ethics. True persecution that is blessed by God is for living a life according to the Beatitudes.
As my study continues to evolve I have started writing a book length personal reflection on the Beatitudes. Fall and Rise, in which I attempt to show their relevance to modern life in concrete ways.
I see the Beatitudes as being revolutionary. They are antithetical to conventional wisdom or common sense in our present culture. The Beatitudes are not mere rhetoric, but apply to every area of life, from poverty and one's attitude towards money and things and how we care for those who have less to our relationship to the earth, to matter itself and to ecology.
The Beatitudes teach us how to "be peace," not just be at peace, but to become peace so that peace can spread, and that peace can come from being rooted both in the life of God and in the physical world.]]>Universal Health Care Is a Moral Imperativetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16384882012-07-05T07:22:18-04:002012-09-04T05:12:15-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
When the federal government intruded upon the privacy rights of slave owners, the former prevailed after a terrible and bloody civil war. The legal status and privacy rights of women, however, won out over federal intrusion in the case of abortion-on-demand.
(That is the legal argument in reference to abortion-on-demand; i.e., that the privacy rights of women -- or property rights over their own bodies -- trumped the human rights, or civil rights, of the unborn, which were previously upheld by the illegality of abortion.)
In the first instance, one might appeal finally to the basic human right of the slave to be a free person over the property rights of the slave-owners. In the second, the appeal of pro-lifers is to the basic human rights, or as the progressive writer Nat Hentoff argues, the civil rights of the unborn as against the privacy and ownership issues of the pregnant woman.
In the present debate, the conflict is the same: the basic human and civil rights of the uninsured against the property rights of those who do not want to pay taxes in order to establish social structures, such as federal insurance, that benefits their neighbors.
A policy that is opposed to the implementation of universal health care on the basis of the freedom to refuse to give assistance, when that assistance is readily available and would otherwise save the lives and improve the health of those who are in need, is in the final analysis a denial of human rights.
Universal health care as a basic human right is both a truly liberal position as well as a truly pro-life issue. To claim that its implementation shouldn't be "coerced" because it takes away the aspect of "charity," as many Tea Party libertarians and members of the evangelical right have maintained, is tantamount to saying that coercing slave-owners to free their slaves also impinged on their right to love their slaves and free them of their own volition. It is exactly like saying that coercing women not to have abortions would be, if it were the law (as most conservatives wish), a denial of the woman's choice to freely accept and love her child. (In other words, each side borrows the other side's argument when it suits them.)
In a word: the argument that universal insurance is coercive and subtracts from charity is nonsense when we understand the issue of one as a moral imperative. Slaves should be free whether those who claim ownership over them feel the correct way about it or not; babies should not be killed, especially in late-term abortions, whether their mothers love them or not; and the uninsured should be provided for and covered whether we care about them personally or not.
Any conservative who argues against government intrusion in the case of health care, but argues for government intrusion in the case of abortion, is logically inconsistent. Likewise, any liberal who argues against government intrusion in the case of abortion, but argues for government intrusion in the case of health care, is inconsistent.
It is within the realm of human and civil rights that the debate needs to be structured and waged -- other lines of argumentation are either red herrings, or are rooted in a presumption that denies the existence of basic rights, rights that are not beyond the purview of the Constitution, are nearly explicit in the Declaration of Independence, and are clearly spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 under prominent American influence.
The right to basic health care is limited by the structure of each individual's social responsibilities and duties. A healthy debate on what this entails, outside political grandstanding or inadequate bills, is not only necessary, but is also a debate that is long overdue.]]>The One Percent and Mimetic Desiretag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16293222012-07-02T22:04:59-04:002012-09-01T05:12:12-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
Once the bigger barns are built, he figures, "I'll say to myself ... you have many goods stored up for many years; take your ease: eat, drink and be merry." In response to this, God says, "You fool! Tonight you are going to die and then whose will those things be which you have provided?"
The context of the parable has Jesus more or less provoking a large number of people who have gathered around him. He is telling them not to worry, and to not be afraid of persecution and death. He has pronounced woe on religious leaders and the lawyers who serve them.
From the crowd, someone who seems to be not really listening, perhaps a leftover cast member from a Monty Python movie, asks him for a favor. "Tell my brother to divide the inheritance," he says.
The man obviously assumes he deserves part of the inheritance, and that he does not deserve his present circumstance. He is hoping Jesus, who is showing himself as authoritative, will step in and be both a religious leader and lawyer on his behalf. Jesus declines to do so, and he tells the man, "Beware of covetousness. Your life does not consist in the abundance of the things you possess."
The Christian philosopher Rene Girard bases much of his work on the word "covetousness," which may be rendered as "desire." Jesus warns against desire as the locomotion of acquisitiveness. Girard takes it to the next step and elaborately shows through his oeuvre that we not only desire an abundance of things, but we desire to have the particular things that belong to others.
We see other people fulfill or seek to fulfill their desires, and a kind of craving is born for the same object the other wants. This is why television advertising works. Desire is born from a concrete witness. In the Old Testament vernacular, God commands that we not covet or desire the neighbor's ox, or ass, or wife. The type of covetousness brought to the fore here is one that borrows or replicates desire from one's neighbor; therefore Girard names it mimetic desire. It apes or mimes the desires one sees that his neighbor has fulfilled, and because my neighbor wants, I also want.
Mimetic desire, per Girard, is the source of the conflict that leads to scapegoating, violence and war. Girard elaborates on the story of Cain and Abel and shows that because Abel acquired something that Cain did not have, the blessing of God, Cain's desire for what Abel has leads him to commit the first human murder.
In the case of the brother who wants Jesus to coerce a division of an inheritance, we see mimetic desire play out as if on cue -- not unlike in the story of Cain and Abel. But instead of murdering his brother, he comes to Jesus and asks him to be a judge in the matter. The answer that Jesus gives does not address whether or not the inheritance should be fairly split. Nor does he address what the man actually deserves in legal terms, but rather, he speaks directly to the man's desire, his covetousness.
Interestingly, when Jesus says, "beware of covetousness" the words seem to echo the words God speaks to Cain in Genesis, telling him that sin lies at his door, but that he should overpower it. What would such a sin be except the desire to have what his brother has, which he does not have and which causes him to be angry and downcast?
Jesus proceeds with the parable. Rather than share his surplus with others, the fool decides to hoard it, even though he can't contain it. No problem; he'll just build bigger barns. St. John Chrysostom, in his sermon on poverty and wealth, says there is no need for us to build bigger barns, that we already have all the barns that we need, "the stomachs of the poor."
Mimetic desire plays a significant role here as well, when those who have, see the desire of those who do not. Even though the fool already owns all that he needs, we may surmise that he apes the desire of others to have what he has and in competition clings to his own possessions even more.
The interior contrast that Jesus is driving at here is stark. We can attach ourselves to what we have to the point where it drives us to a kind of madness in which we begin to accumulate even more things, driven by desire, and put off being happy until later; or we can be grateful and content with what we have - eat, drink and be merry, and recognize that all that we have belongs to others as well. St. Ambrose writes poignantly to this conflict, "The things which we cannot take with us are not ours. Only virtue will be our companion when we die."
Rather than denoting a morbid austerity, however, the parable also implies the rich possibilities of entering one's own life. It connotes liberation from a final dependence on things or perfect circumstances. The implication of the fool's decision cuts both ways. We can appreciate what we have, including the the gift of each moment. The gift does not need to be draped in the best possible circumstance in order for us to receive it.]]>Is All Marriage Sacramental?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12147082012-02-13T07:08:06-05:002012-04-14T05:12:01-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
Despite what the Republican contenders and many others try to establish, the reality is that the Christian Church did not invent marriage; however, the Church did bless it and sanctify it with very specific purposes, primarily for the transformation of two people, a husband and wife, a man and a woman, who through service to each other also serve God. While there is evidence that many of the early Christians believed that the basic function of sexuality was for procreation, there is no evidence that this was ever widely held to be the main purpose for marriage. In other words, marriage was not blessed by the Church merely as a justification for sex. Rather, the sacrament, or the mystery of marriage -- the sanctification of a social institution within the context of the Church -- understood in its best expression, is held to be a salvific enterprise whereby two people unite to cooperate with God for their mutual benefit, edification and salvation.That's the Christian definition and interpretation of marriage, but it isn't universal or even fundamental to what marriage is itself.
To put it another way, the sacrament of marriage takes something human and offers it back to God in the transforming mystery of divine grace. Marriage is transformed into something else as a sacrament than what it was previously. It is a mistake to conflate or confuse the human institution with the sacrament of the Church.
There is a real difference between marriage as a civil construction, a convention that changes, and marriage as a holy mystery that occurs in the lives of believers. To conflate or confuse the two realities also fosters serious questions about the role of the state in relationship to the Church.
If the institution of marriage is, as the Republicans and others claim, fundamentally a sacrament that should be defined on the federal level as per the Christian definition, this is an astonishing move toward theocracy and more government intervention into private lives. It is an affront to liberty in a democratic nation that has as one of its founding principles the freedom of religion and explicitly forbids the government from enacting religious duties or responsibilities. The First Amendment proclaims, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." But who administers or defines sacraments except religions?
More to the point, if the federal government is empowered to define marriage as a sacrament without distinction, thereby opening up the "official" definition to further modification through amendments in years and decades to come (a movement that would likely ultimately directly defeat and contradict its initial purpose), what other sacraments of the Church, or of other faiths, should the state be empowered to define? Baptism? Communion? Confession?
The answer is that marriage is not a sacrament unless it is performed in the context of faith. Sacraments and other matters of faith are not civic institutions and are not functions of the state, and the state should not be arrogated any power at all to define them. The way that a specific body of faith interprets marriage should be protected, but the way a democratic nation defines marriage for its citizens should be open to interpretation in a way that manifestly addresses the rights of everyone. In other words, the Church should be able to define marriage the way it always has, and to only marry those whom it will. On the other hand, the state should be able to administer Constitutional rights for everyone and marry whomever convention allows.
The Church may have an opinion regarding gay marriage, but its arguments should be substantial and not built on the fallacy that gay marriage threatens the Christian sacrament of marriage. In the final analysis, the practice of gay marriage, whereby nontraditional couples are given the same legal rights as traditional couples, does absolutely nothing to discredit or threaten sacramental marriage. Marriage as a human institution universal among cultures and marriage as a sacrament of the Church are two different things.]]>The Polarities of an Occupying Ethostag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11451502011-12-16T12:38:35-05:002012-02-15T05:12:01-05:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
Like the word "cleave," there are two meanings involved in the word "occupy," one of which is the exact opposite of the other. We can occupy as those who dominate but have no genuine relationship to that which they try to possess and control, a dynamic through which all things become objects of consumption, expendable once used, and therefore ultimately lose all value; or we can occupy that to which we already belong, collectively, as easily and naturally as our blood and bones inhabit the boundaries of our flesh.
An occupation in the first instance is a military endeavor that usually devolves into continuous conflict and oppression; it belongs to the lexicon of war terminology. On the other hand, an occupation is also why you wake up most days and get dressed, drink your coffee and for which you leave your home with the goal of making money and supporting yourself and your dependents. The former is violent and radical; the latter is natural and progressive and useful.
To occupy, one might suggest, is the work of occupants, the former occupants of homes that are being foreclosed, many of whom have lost their occupations and cannot find another, due in part to the unregulated practices of radicalized financial institutions hedging their bets against their own losses.
To occupy a street or a park or a school or a city is an occupation that broaches vocation, although keeping oneself occupied without being brutalized, arrested and stigmatized, without being preoccupied with merely surviving in the attempt to occupy that space in which you truly belong, is the great difficulty. Many who occupy are lost occupants, or at least they represent the occupants of loss, the many who have senselessly lost both homes and occupations, who want to reoccupy that which has been stolen, the resources that belong to all that have been transmuted into commodities for the benefit of the few.
The polarities inherent in the word are as stark as the differences between attempting to dominate the earth, or being reconciled to it; seeking to possess an object for its abstract value, or valuing what you have for however long you have it. The Japanese poet, Issa, speaks of his relationship to material things, and of how the value of that which he truly possesses cannot be evaluated or apprehended through the type of possession that motivates burglary: "The thief left it behind: / the moon at the window."
An occupation of dominance would want to grasp the moon, possibly mine it as per a science fiction nightmare generated in the mind of Heinlein, be the first to get there to plant a flag, lay claim to it, own it. But in a moment of loss, considering what the thief did not take because he could not take it, the poet truly possesses the moon, or rather, is possessed by it. That is the difference between an occupation of militant dominance, and an occupation of a natural inhabitant, the difference between living life in endless empty pursuits as a consumerist, and being content to simply consume what we already have. The few through domination coerce and manipulate and lie and destroy, and to some degree we are all, in the affluent western hemisphere, complicit.
We are all complicit to some degree with the manipulations of the few, the oligarchs, due to our corporate addiction to consumerist culture (or, alternately, our consumerist addiction to corporate culture), and this will be the downfall of any positive occupation, despite protests and arrests and deeply felt struggles to embrace community and responsibility, despite efforts to promote a peaceful revolution that moves naturally from the inside outward.
The implicit danger is subtle. It is to change the meaning of the positive aspect of what it means to occupy or reoccupy that public sphere to which we belong into the dominant and negative, military sense of occupation, perhaps in small ways, or by not admitting it when we do. I am reminded of bell hooks and her brilliant essay, "Feminism", in which she describes the ways in which those who are dominated also in turn dominate others. She argues effectively that the woman who is dominated by patriarchy at her place of employment often goes home and dominates her children in turn. "It is first the potential oppressor within we must resist," she writes, "the potential victim within that we must rescue -- otherwise we cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation."
The reductionist agent that will change a positive sense of occupation, of living where we belong and laying claim to it, to the negative, that of seeking to dominate what is not ours to possess and which will never fulfill its promise to satisfy, is consumerism.
There is nothing ignoble or immoral about consumption. We must consume to live, and live to exist. We consume, whether food or drink or pleasures that are simple or complex. We consume energy, thoughts, ideas. We eat death, as the late Fr. Alexander Schmemann tells it -- food that is composed of dead things that we must store in a freezer unit in order to preserve it. And we have opportunity to eat life as well, to consume God, spiritual energy, the Body and Blood of Christ, in the paradox of mystery.
Whether we consume death or consume life, we are built as creatures around the principle of consumption. Therefore, when all things, including the natural resources to which we belong and have every right to occupy and use for the benefit of us all, when everything is branded and manipulated and coerced into becoming an object of consumption for the sake of gratifying that which cannot be satisfied, this is without nobility or morality or value and leads to destruction. It is the consumption of death unto death. Consumption that never satisfies or fills the one who is consuming, the continuous digestion of that which lacks the psychic nutrients to provide us with genuine sustenance, is at its heart nihilistic and self-annihilating.
Consumerism is the ultimate preoccupation, the sort of which Nero is said to have practiced, in which we dazzle and gratify ourselves both in our entertainments and our greed for the monetary means to sustain them. It is a trap that causes us to be complicit, if not aware, with those who profit from our own noetic despoilation. Such is the pulse and heart of consumerism by which the 1 percent keep us captive, and in which money truly is proven to be the root of all kinds of evil.
The word occupy also connotes presence, however, which is the precursor to love. We cannot love that which we cannot know, and we cannot know that which is not in any way present. And we cannot be present unless we occupy, in the positive sense, that to which we belong. We all belong to the earth, rather than the earth belonging to us, and we belong to each other as an essential humanity in which difference is finally a technical distinction.
An occupation of diversity and of transformation, of seeking the continual renewal not just of individual human minds but of social structures, of financial institutions, of the way we do business or educate, of politics and spirituality and art, is an occupation and a vocation for which we are born, which is to be in communion with all things and each other through love. ]]>The Call to Love Our Enemies (Including Terrorists)tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9565712011-09-10T03:45:42-04:002011-11-09T05:12:02-05:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
The Dragon seeks power through domination, an exertion of force, coercion and law. Its action in the world is understood in terms of a "common sense" that devolves into the depravity of cynicism. It expresses itself through conflict on every level from the global to the personal, in terms of war, the lust for power, a pride of life that denies the sovereignty of God, consumerism and its subsequent addictions, and the lack of peace that is temporarily satiated by control and exploitation, pleasure and self-indulgence.
The Lamb that is slain who is in opposition to the beast, and who prevails, is Jesus. His kingdom follows a completely different set of principles, which are described by Christ in the beatitudes. The peacemaker does not use the same weapons as those who live in the world of the beast, but is rather armed with truth, faith, forbearance, forgiveness, mercy, grace and the love of enemies.
Loving enemies, however, seems on an experiential and existential level to be counterintuitive, and contrary to common sense. The religious leaders, teachers and scribes of Christ's time were challenged by Him because they held the "traditions of men"; we may hold onto similar ideas, political assumptions, or our own notions of "common sense" that are rooted in our own finite and tainted experiences, our own rationality, rather than in the experience and knowledge of God. But the peacemaker engages in warfare with weapons that are not of this world.
We tend to balk at the idea of loving our enemies even more strongly than we resist the notion that the way to true riches is through poverty of spirit, or that the way to find comfort in the face of death is not by going out and trying to be happy, or by trying to evade pain by lifting our spirits, whether in more healthy ways or through addictive but destructive escape mechanisms - but rather we find comfort in Christ through mourning, fullness through hunger, forgiveness through forgiving others, and so on through all the beatitudes.
Jesus teaches us that the way to the fulfillment of the promise of the kingdom of heaven is to accept and be transformed through the difficulties with which we are faced. We become children of God through peacemaking, which involves facing conflict, rather than avoiding it. Therefore, the path to healing, reconciliation and peace is to love our enemies, rather than fight them.
As St. Silouan writes, ""When you will love your enemies, a great divine grace will be living in you."
How can we possibly love our enemies? St. Silouan reminds us that we cannot do so apart from the grace of God. In other words, we must be emptied of our own attachments to the things that we clamor for in an attempt to satisfy lust or evade pain, and allow ourselves to be filled with the presence of God. We empty ourselves so that we may be filled.
There is a Stoic understanding of apathy that seems to regard the lack of attachment as a negation, a difficult ascetic endeavor, self-denial, a notion that assumes that it is primarily marked by absence, the absence of passions or attachments. That element does exist on a subjective level. We do not want to give up the idols which comfort us, which we were reared on, which appeal to our intuitive sense of what is rational or normal, or to which we are addicted and enslaved by. But the ancient Christian idea of apathy does not stop there. It is more characterized by the reality of presence, the experience of the energies of God in the context of our lives here and now, the overwhelming personal manifestation of divine love. When we are filled with the love of God as a real experience, it is not quite so difficult to let go of attachments, or to transform the passions. This includes the capacity to see others as they are and not as potential threats to us, or people who might benefit us in some way.
Through the presence of grace, we can understand that our enemy is like us and as we seek to know our enemies we pay attention to them as they really are, and in merely paying attention we begin the action of loving them. Without the grace and presence of God indwelling us and filling us, truly loving our enemies is not possible.
Martin Luther King Jr. asks, 'how do we love our enemies?' and he has practical suggestions, including learning how to forgive, recognizing that the wrong your enemy has done does not totally define him, and by not seeking to defeat or humiliate our enemy but rather to win his friendship and understanding.
St. John Climacus writes,
Remembrance of wrongs is the consummation of anger, the keeper of sin, hatred of righteousness, ruin of virtues, poison of the soul, worm of the mind, shame of prayer... You will know that you have completely freed yourself of this rot, not when you pray for he person who has offended you, not when you exchange presents with him, not when you invite him to your table, but only when, on hearing that he has fallen into bodily or spiritual misfortune, you suffer and weep for him as for yourself.'
We begin to love our enemies by paying attention to them, by seeing them as they truly are and not as our fears would make them out to be. Martin Luther King takes it further, and writes,
Why should we love our enemies? The first reason is fairly obvious. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....So when Jesus says "Love your enemies," he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies-or else? The chain reaction of evil-hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars-must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.
The peacemaker's love for enemies seems impractical when terrorists blow up our buildings and kill thousands. It seems impractical for Martin Luther King, too, when he describes the way black people are treated in his letter to eight white Clergyman who find his protests distasteful and tell him to stop agitating things and rather wait patiently for justice to eventually be brought to fruition. He writesto them eloquently. movingly and passionately from his jail cell in Birmingham, where he has been
incarcerated for marching without a permit,
[W]hen you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.
In that context, being treated as a nobody without dignity, as less than fully human, not many people would see the practicality of loving one's enemy. How do you love an oppressor who, as per the image from George Orwell's 1984, is constantly slamming his boot into your face? In fact, in circumstances like this, many people advocate not only the humiliation and defeat of the enemy, but outright violence, killing the enemy, whether in war, assassination, capital punishment or violent revolution. Yet Martin Luther King Jr. continues,
To our most bitter opponents we say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.
"
To this I would add the word of St. Maximus the Confessor, who writes,
The Lord says, "love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute you." Why did he command these things? So that he might free you from hatred, sadness, anger and grudges, and might grant you the greatest possession of all, perfect love, which is impossible to possess except by the one who loves all equally in imitation of God.
]]>Slaying Dragons, Wrestling God: Soldiers of Peace in Christian Symbolismtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8707142011-06-10T13:55:20-04:002011-08-10T05:12:01-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
The imagery calls upon the discipline and tools of real soldiers, who manifest a spirit of seriousness and sobriety. In Orthodox baptism, we are not only brought forth from darkness into light, passing over from the tomb to the womb (per St. Cyril of Jersusalem), but we are also enlisted as soldiers of Christ. There is no indication however, that this imagery may justify the use of violence or coercion in the name of the Gospel, the Crusades in the name of Christ, or bombing enemies in order to safeguard corporate greed in the name of family values. Jesus commands Christians to love enemies. We are called, as Paul writes to his spiritual son, Timothy, to fight the good fight of faith. St John Chrysostom notes that the war the Christian soldier fights is a spiritual one, against forces that are not made of flesh and blood.
In both the Western and Eastern churches, we have the image of a soldier in the person of St. George, who is known for slaying a dragon, a metaphor for the courage of a real man who proclaimed his fidelity to Christ during the persecution of Diocletan, and whose subsequent martyrdom through decapitation encouraged other Christians. His bravery was so much an encouragement that within a few hundred years his story was told describing him as a brave soldier who slew a dragon. By standing against the world of mammon and power which the state demanded he worship, and proclaiming his own faith and refusal to worship them, St. George wrestled against the "invisible dragons", the principalities and powers which Paul references, which included his own will to live and his fear as well. The dragons lay slain through the courage and comfort that arose as a result of his martyrdom.
In the western literary canon there is an archetypical symbol of heroic warfare in the knight Parsifal, who also battles dragons. The story of Parsifal is part of the epic Grail myth, and a first reading of it is reminiscent of a situation comedy. Parsifal is a type of holy fool in King Arthur's court, a Knight who grows from extreme naivety to acts of heroism. As a child, his mother is intensely overprotective, and does not allow him to know anything about the world to such a degree that when he first comes across knights in their shiny armor, he believes they are angels. He is instantly attracted to them, and resolves almost immediately to become a knight himself, much to his mother's heartbreak and chagrin.
One of the key factors to consider regarding the story of Parsifal's journey to knighthood, whereupon he must conquer knights and slay dragons, is that according to some of the interpreters of the story, he never kills other human beings, with one exception, the red knight. This leads some to suggest that the story serves as a meaningful tale about an interior fight within the psyche, and that the dragons Parsifal slays represents interior complexes that either cause him to stagnate or to regress -- tendencies that prevent him from ever having any hope of becoming a true knight and a whole man.
According to the popular psychoanalyst, Robert A. Johnson, when Parsifal fights dragons he is battling against his own complexes, particularly his desire to regress into the safety of the protectiveness his mother once offered. One might extract from the story the symbolic warfare we are called to as Christians against cowardice, regression, the need for safety, and especially against fear, which is the enemy of love and therefore of peace. We especially need to fight against fear and the cowardice it enables in us if we have the tendency to conflate comfort with peace.
We want to be comfortable, secure, all of our cultural responsibilities taken care of, and if we reach certain plateaus, we might think of the subsequent satisfaction as consisting of what it means to be at peace. But the role of the peacemaker is not necessarily to make others feel comfortable if it is at the expense of a deeper conflict. There are times when we may be tempted to believe the lie that ignorance is bliss, and in affluent cultures we have huge media outlets which are built upon an economy of advertising that wants us to believe that very notion, and is keyed to keeping us ignorant, satiated and always wanting more.
Peace must be devoted to truth, and it takes courage to slay dragons when they rage inside us and represent in us the things to which we cling when we are filled with fear, insecurity, cowardice and alienation. The peacemaker as a soldier of Christ fights the battle against interior dragons, and begins to experience true, authentic peace when they are slain.
The symbol of a soldier also speaks to a type of spiritual violence which may be signified by the image of Jacob wrestling with an angel. We seek our spiritual blessings from God in prayer with an effort and commitment that resembles the work of an intense fight, and in the end, God changes us. He injures us, or exposes our wound, so that we may be healed. If we repress our doubts, we may become victims to false certainties. If we hide, we cannot be rescued. If there are no symptoms of the disease, it may progress, hidden, until death overcomes us.
The poet, Rilke, composed the following poem which indirectly speaks to me about this aspect of our relationship with God, titled, The Man Watching:
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestler of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
Whatever Rilke had in mind, it's good for me and encouraging to remind myself that wrestling, the struggle with difficulties, with doubt, with conflict, with poverty, with meekness, with prayer and with God is a transformational fight. It is the fight of a soldier, as per St. Paul. And as in the Rilke poem, my own failures, or those things that we tend to see as weaknesses (such as poverty or meekness) in Christ and through the grace of God are transformed into the blessings that Jesus describes. On the other hand, the small things in which my ego, or selfish ambitions, or small comforts, win, are small victories that reduce me to their miniscule level. Who is the victor, the aggressive person who is agile at feats of one-upmanship? Or the person who loses because he does not play the game, but whose heart is single and full of virtue? When wrestling with God, it is somehow honorable to consider each loss a true win.
This interior combat -- striving for God and in so doing actually wrestling with God, as well as fighting against my own passions and proclivities, is the meaning of asceticism. Being a true peacemaker therefore has to do with being at peace within ourselves, which is a peace that comes from God.
This is a revised, truncated version of my latest podcast, Seeking Peace, at Ancient Faith Radio. the full version can be heard here.]]>The Pure in Heart Shall See Godtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8547382011-04-30T08:06:49-04:002011-06-30T05:12:01-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, "The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is sound, your body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" (Matthew 6:22-23).
Given these two ideas, one might conclude that to the degree that we have divided or fragmented hearts, our hearts are impure and our vision is obscured. Keeping our hearts sound is key not only to seeing ourselves as we really are, but to seeing God.
How do we go about having a pure heart? Jesus provides a clue in the next verse: "No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon." Mammon is the idol of wealth, and all the minor desires, lusts, pleasures and interests that are compacted within the pursuit of money and riches. In order to have a pure heart, one must have one master, in order to will one thing.
What Is a Heart? The basic, historical, Christian definition of the heart is that it is the absolute center of the human person.
What is purity of heart? St. Isaac of Nineveh says that purity of heart "is a heart full of compassion for the whole of created nature..." He continues:
"And what is a compassionate heart? ... It is a heart which burns for all creation, for the birds, for the beasts, for the devils, for every creature. When he thinks about them, when he looks at them, his eyes fill with tears. So strong, so violent is his compassion ... that his heart breaks when he sees the pain and suffering of the humblest creature. That is why he prays with tears at every moment ... for all the enemies of truth and for all who cause him harm, that they may be protected and forgiven. He prays even for serpents in the boundless compassion that wells up in his heart after God's likeness."
If we regard the Beatitudes as a ladder, we arrive at purity of heart when we start with poverty of spirit, which among many other virtues is rooted in humility and leads to gratitude. Next, we mourn for our sins, the sins of others and the corruption that through the reality of death has overtaken all of existence and penetrated nature itself. We remain meek, refusing to be filled with notions of entitlement or to compare ourselves with others or with what other people have or what other people do. We hunger and thirst for righteousness as if it were bread and water, the righteousness of Christ that justifies us so that we may act justly in the world. We extend mercy to everyone for everything, not judging anyone for anything and in so doing we feed the hungry and visit the prisoner and give to the poor. We extend mercy and hospitality to whoever is put before us at any moment. And as we follow these steps, we also have the promise of the kingdom of heaven; we find comfort; the rift between our spirits and bodies begins to be healed and we are reconciled with the earth and the world of matter; we are filled with authentic righteousness and we obtain mercy for our own sins. The foregoing are the prerequisite steps to purity of heart, and one moves up the ladder through humility, watchfulness and prayer.
The word nepsis is a theological term that is used to denote watchfulness or mindfulness. Another translation is sobriety. An unsober heart need not be one that has been taken captive by wine, alcohol or other addicting substances, but it can be one that perhaps is intoxicated by pride, or lulled to sleep by discursive thoughts. A heart that is pulled into fragments by various lusts -- by the need to compare oneself with others, by expectations, by the feeling of entitlement, by envy or boredom or shame -- is a heart that is not sober.
By contrast, nepsis may also be thought of as mindfulness, awareness of oneself and of God's presence everywhere and in all things, a presence that, as our awareness enters into it, excludes many of our ambitions, worries, comparisons and judgments. Prayer is essential to watchfulness. Many people find the Jesus prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me") to be useful in summoning this type of awareness and of entering into the stillness that is the reality of God's presence. One may also find it critical to follow the footsteps of others who have better vision, as well. Watchfulness, mindfulness and prayer that strengthens the will in cooperation with divine grace to will one thing -- communion with God -- unifies the heart and gradually makes it pure.
There are many saints in the Orthodox Church who exemplify purity of heart, but one of the most popular in the Russian Church and around the world is St. Seraphim of Sarov. Jim Forest writes succinctly about St. Seraphim in his book, The Ladder of the Beatitudes:
"In talks with visitors Saint Seraphim stressed "the acquisition of the Holy Spirit" so that the kingdom of God can take possession of the heart. A man of constant prayer and fasting, Seraphim reminded them that ascetic practice was only a means to a greater end: 'Prayer, fasting, watching may be good in themselves; yet it is not in these practices alone that the goal of our Christian life is found, though they are necessary means for its attainment. The true goal consists in our acquiring the Holy Spirit of God.' On occasion he put the message even more simply: 'Acquire the Spirit of Peace, and thousands around you will be saved.'
Seraphim recognized kindness, joy, and the refusal to condemn others as signs of God's presence in the heart:
'You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other. We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves. When we gaze at our own failings, we see such a swamp that nothing in another can equal it. That is why we turn away, and make much of the faults of others. Instead of condemning others, strive to reach inner peace. Keep silent, refrain from judgment. This will raise you above the deadly arrows of slander, insult, and outrage and will shield your glowing hearts against all evil.'"
We are called to purity of heart, which is the heart cleansed by divine love, a love that washes the noetic lens so that we can see more clearly ourselves as we really are and as we are meant to become -- so that we can see the light that radiates from the very face of God, as well. This is our purpose. As we Orthodox sing in the service of Paschal Matins, our candles lit against the darkness that surrounds us in the midnight hour: "By Thy Resurrection O Christ our savior, the angels in Heaven sing, enable us who are on Earth, to glorify thee in purity of heart."
]]>Why Christ's Resurrection Matterstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8528262011-04-25T00:11:00-04:002011-06-24T05:12:01-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
Reared on happy consumerism, one might feel satisfied to view holidays such as Easter (or Pascha) in isolation, a special day that is set apart to celebrate an event that has significance for us only insofar as it appeals to our sense of convention and propriety. Even if we are moderately religious, we cannot escape the cultural fascination with secular tropes, where the "special day" adheres in our consciousness as a celebration not of an historical event that has immediate significance even now, but which appeals to us mainly from the basis of what we experienced in our own childhoods, the memory of our own individual Easter celebrations or family rituals, whether idealized or not. Even those who despise "organized religion" and treat it with contempt do not seem to mind an only somewhat disorganized religious ritualism that is signified by bunnies and eggs, dressing up for a religious service on hopefully a beautiful spring day, hidden eggs colored a variety of shades of blue and pink and yellow and red, often dyed the night before by excited children, and baskets filled with chocolate and other goodies.
In the context of the worship of the Church among those believers who participate in the fasts and feasts of the Church calendar year, the celebration of Pascha is not just one special day of revelry to commemorate a specific religious event, but it resides within the context of a much longer story, one that continues throughout the entire year, but narrows in intensity during Lent. People who pop into services once a year to celebrate Easter in the same spirit as one might go to a movie or stand on the side of the road to watch a parade may find themselves made happy by the celebration, which is a good thing in itself; but they miss so much of the substance of it that it might be compared to reading the CliffsNotes or mistaking the preview for the movie.
But that also is a bad comparison -- the difference might actually be between watching the preview and playing a role in the film as an actor, familiar with the subject, filled with the raw experience of the life of Jesus Christ, who comes not in order to entertain us, nor to judge us, nor to teach a particular branch of science or an ethical system. But he comes, we find in the icon of the Nativity, peculiarly wrapped in what appears to be graveclothes, his cradle oddly resembling a coffin, the cave in which the baby lies not just a random hole in the earth, but made by his presence into the entrance to the very heart of the earth. He comes to die, and those who follow him do not merely watch, but die with him, baptized into his death in a manner that is above all rationality.
So during Holy Week we follow the Passion, not to meditate on the violence done to Jesus nor to feel sorry for him, but to mourn our own weaknesses and sins. We do not engage in the process of reflection on our own behavior in order to try to feel pathologically guilty or to punish ourselves, but in order to turn away from the behaviors which ruin us and other people, so that we might progress to mutual healing and communion. During Lent and Holy Week we seek forgiveness from every creature for the nasty things, or perhaps just the unkind things, we have done in our lives. We seek to humble ourselves with Christ as if we too might be humbled to the point of death, in Him, not as a mere memory, but as a mystery of the unity and communion in Christ that not only breaks the barriers between the physical and immaterial worlds, but transcends space and time as well.
We do not attend for a mere memorial or to play with dead symbols in meaningless ceremonies, but we identify with Christ in his Passion, and we identify with those who killed him for whom he prays when he is held aloft on the cross that they would be forgiven. If Christ does not rise from death, thereby trampling down death by death, then we remain dead, victims of death and undone by the tragedy of death. If his resurrection is merely a myth to imbue our lives with meaning, the meaning is spoiled by its lack of veracity and it becomes as insubstantial as stories of the Easter Bunny. St. Paul writes, "...if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile." But if it is a myth that is also true, both historically and subjectively, that Jesus died and was resurrected so that when we die in Him we may also be raised with Him, then it has the power and potential to transform all death, all separation, all tragedy, all failure and all suffering into a path that leads to resurrection, life, justice, beauty and communion with God.
As the late theologian, Fr. Alexander Schmemann writes:
All Christianity, therefore, is the experience of faith repeated again and again as if for the first time, through its incarnation in rites, words, music, and colors. To the unbeliever, it may indeed seem like a mirage; he hears only words, he sees only incomprehensible ceremonies, and he understands them only outwardly. But for believers, all of this radiates from within, and not as proof of his faith, but as its result, as its life in the world, in the soul, in history. Therefore the darkness and sadness of Holy Friday is for us something real, alive, contemporary; we can cry at the cross and experience everything that took place in that triumph of evil, treachery, cowardice, and betrayal; we can contemplate the life-bearing tomb on Holy Saturday with excitement and hope. And therefore, every year we can celebrate Easter, Pascha, the Resurrection. For Easter is not the remembrance of an event in the past. It is the real encounter in happiness and joy, with him whom our hearts long ago knew and encountered as the life and light of all light. Easter night testifies that Christ is alive and with us, and that we are alive with him. The entire celebration is an invitation to look at the world and life, and to behold the dawning of the mystical day of the Kingdom of light. "Today the scent of Spring begins," sings the church, "and the new creation exults..." It exults in faith, in love and in hope.
]]>Those Who Are Merciful Will Obtain Mercytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8224762011-02-28T08:34:24-05:002011-05-25T18:30:24-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
The model is Christ, who shows mercy to all through his sacrificial redemption of the world on the cross. He also says, "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." This follows a progression of spiritual ascension that begins with poverty of spirit, a quality that moves one to mourn and weep when faced with sin and its consequences, death and its multitudinous manifestations, a fire of grief that promotes meekness -- which is primarily the loss of self and self-interest in order to be filled with divine love, which originates in a relationship with God that reconnects the human person with the earth, the spirit with the world of matter; moreover, it is a meekness that hungers and thirsts for righteousness, and is satisfied through a life that is permeated with the divine fire of love and expressed in works of mercy.
The blessing upon the merciful seems to flow directly from the previous beatitude in that the merciful are those who have hungered and thirsted for righteousness, and have been satisfied; in other words, they are made righteous through cooperation with the grace of God revealed in Jesus Christ, who shows us what it means to be merciful through his own suffering and crucifixion. As their own lives are justified, they begin to manifest justice in the world, and this is chiefly shown through an expression of mercy. Mercy is love in action.
The merciful do not follow a necessarily easy path. The cross that Jesus carried to his death, whereby he trampled down death by death, was a hard road for Him, so much so that he prayed fervently in the garden of Gethsemane, and sweat drops of blood. Showing mercy to others, like being poor, or mourning, or being meek, or like hunger and thirst, is a quality of soul that necessitates death, self-denial, perhaps even significant personal loss. Similarly, Jesus teaches us to pray, 'forgive us our debts, even as we forgive our debtors."
We pay attention to that which we love, and if we love others with the love of God, we will see them not only as being of value because they are made in His image, but as worthy of love because of the person who is there, even if effaced by many sins and distortions of personality. The merciful pay attention to whoever is before them without judging them because of their social status or appearance. St. James has strong words for those who give preference for the rich, while diminishing the poor. And Jesus, speaking of the various judgments people made of him, said that man judges according to appearance, but God judges according to the heart. The merciful give attention to others without condemnation or blame for what they have done or what they do.
Being merciful isn't contingent upon anything. We cannot say, 'you did this to yourself; you live in poverty because you are lazy; or, you are sick because you do not eat healthy foods; or, you have cancer because you smoke cigarettes; or you are addicted because you hate your own body; therefore, because of these things, I am under no obligation to help you." The merciful do not make those kinds of judgments; those are for God alone to make. Our job is to be merciful to all, and thereby obtain mercy.
St. Isaac of Syria writes,
"You have not been appointed to decree vengeance upon men's deeds and works, but rather to ask for mercy for the world, to keep vigil for salvation of all, and to partake in every man's suffering, both the just and sinner's. Instead of an avenger, be a deliverer. Instead of a faultfinder, be a soother. Instead of a betrayer, be a martyr. Instead of a chider, be a defender. Beseech God in behalf of sinners that they receive mercy, and pray to Him for the righteous that they be preserved. Conquer evil men by your gentle kindness, and make zealous men wonder at your goodness. Put the lover of justice to shame by your compassion. Remember that the sins of all men go before them to the judgment seat."
Being merciful may or may not involve big things. It more likely involves being merciful where I am at right now. In a marriage that means continuous forgiveness, both seeking it from the other and granting it. In a family, it means all the things that constitute the sacrifices of family life -- giving up personal time or ambitions or luxuries for those whom we love -- but it's more likely more difficult on a simpler level ... for instance, being merciful when your loved one repeats the same annoying habit for seemingly the thousandth time. Small annoyances can blow up fast. Learning to transcend or deal with even really minor annoyances is a beginning, a spark, a movement toward being among the merciful.
Sometimes, of course, such annoyances may be symptoms of larger issues, an elephant in the room, and so learning to love and be merciful in the minor things may help to work one's way up the chain to resolving more complex problems. I don't think any of us are ever going to "overcome" the difficulties of living with other people, both major and minor, no matter what that may entail for each one of us specifically, but we can learn to be merciful in whatever situation we live. The fact that we may always be faced with strife, misunderstandings and miscommunication, an uncaught harsh word, bad moods and annoyances just means we have plenty of opportunity set before us to practice mercy, and to obtain mercy according to the promise of Christ.
This article is excerpted from my podcast, "Seeking Peace", which may be heard at Ancient Faith Radio.]]>Those Who Hunger and Thirst for Righteousness Will be Filledtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8119832011-01-24T22:23:51-05:002011-05-25T18:25:24-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
I think that at the bottom layer of human need lies the most basic and authentic hunger, which is for the life of God and to be in communion with the Holy Trinity. It is a hunger for divine light, divine fire, divine love, all of which are ways of talking about the same personal and holy divine being, who is not limited by necessity so that he cannot give each and every single one of us his constant attention and care.
We may thirst for things to be made right, for those who hate us not to hate us, for those we dislike to grow on us, for reconciliation, for the end of poverty and greed, for the end of division and grief. We may thirst to no longer feel compelled to compare ourselves with others, which fosters the death of both pride and shame, the dissolution of fear and the resolution of all conflict.
We hunger for the righteousness of God, which the Gospel tells us we cannot attain ourselves. This is the point of St. Paul in his introductory remarks in the epistle to the Romans. Righteousness and justice are finally the same reality, both compatible with mercy.
So it isn't revenge or retribution that we are hungry for, as if after caring for the wounded man by the roadside who had been beaten by robbers, the good Samaritan, played by Clint Eastwood, got on a horse and chased them down to wreak some havoc. That really doesn't come into the equation. Retribution may be a sad finality for some who resist God to the very end, but retribution is not a necessity for justice to become a present reality in our hearts and in our lives. Contrary to popular opinion, closure doesn't take place when a murderer is captured, imprisoned and murdered by the state; I know victims who will back me up on that. Closure takes place when the victim, or the victims who are left living, are able to extricate all soul-poisoning hungers from their hearts, minds and bodies through deep mourning, tears, love and even, if possible, forgiveness.
Jesus says on the Sermon on the Mount, "blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness," and it is this righteousness, the justice of God revealed in the person of Christ himself, to which he refers. It is a righteousness that not only reveals God to be just, but which justifies those who are in Christ, gradually makes them righteous, and the goodness and peace and justice of God spreads throughout the world, like a mustard seed that grows into a great tree. Being made righteous according to Paul in his epistle to the Romans is therefore the fruit of conversion, a real and living change in one's heart and behaviors that results in being united to Christ -- being in Christ -- and doesn't seem to really have much to do with legal status.
We often, however, allow our basic human need for the grace of God, the presence of divine love and his righteousness revealed in Jesus Christ, to be fragmented through resistance and rebellion against God. We try, like our first parents, to fill the need without God, to eat the forbidden fruit, to be made wise through our own energy and effort, without grace or the presence of divine love. Because of the condition of death in which we live in the fallen cosmos, the fragmented need for God transmutes into a multitude of small hungers, miniscule thirsts, which inform the body's natural appetites beyond their legitimate use.
A hunger for the love of God might then be transmuted into sexual lust, the desire to possess another person as if that will fulfill one's need. Or in the insatiable thirst for success, fame, recognition -- all symptoms of the desire for love, but turned into appetites that may finally lead to numbing habits, addictions and enslavement to one's own body. Hunger is twisted into avarice, our bellies become our gods and thirst turns into a type of vampirism, whereby we destroy rather than commune with those whom we seek to control or coerce in the name of love, or in the name of success, or in the name of profit, or any of a number of other contemporary ambitions fueled by fragmented needs that have turned into passionate desires, which can never be satisfied and that seem to inhere in the flesh itself.
St. John Chrysostom, in elucidating this Beatitude says that the opposite of the virtue of righteousness is covetousness. This is a driving force in many of our lives -- the desire to have something we do not have, which we see that others have. It isn't necessarily limited to material possessions, but can be many other things as well, coveting privileges, or fame, or power, or control, or even to be someone we are not, another person.
The person who hungers and thirsts after righteousness, however, recognizes his poverty and through poverty of spirit has the humility to submit himself to God and not seek to possess a multitude of things or to control other people. Instead, this person possesses the kingdom of God. Mourning the condition of death and all the consequent separations, he repents and is cleansed of bodily defilement through his own tears. In meekness he does not compete or compare himself with others in a struggle for what is not really needful. He begins to hunger and thirst not to satisfy various lusts for pleasure, to numb fear through comforting habits or through pride and shame, but for the righteousness of God to be manifest in him and through him as he participates in divine life through faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount that he will be filled, which we may take to mean that he will become righteous.
There are many examples of people, both ancient and contemporary, who have hungered for righteousness and proven themselves to be filled with the fire of God's love. I think for example of Maria Skobstova, an aristocrat who became an intellectual, an intellectual who became a nun, a nun who became a subversive force for love. She sought to make straight that which had been made crooked among the poor, in prisons, in insane asylums because she saw every human being as intrinsically valuable, as an "icon of God." In 1942, when Jews were being rounded up in German-occupied Paris, Maria managed to organize the rescue of children who she smuggled out of the sports stadium in garbage bins with the help of garbage collectors. She did not relent in her work on behalf of the oppressed even though she was aware she was under Nazi surveillance. Finally, she was sent to the concentration camp at Ravensbruck, where, still burning with the holy passion and hunger for righteousness, a desire that had become a flame of love, she continued to assist and care for those who were suffering with her. She nearly made it to the end, and even as Russian troops were advancing on the camp, she put herself in the place of another woman condemned to die, and died in her place. Her hunger and thirst for righteousness was satisfied as she herself became righteous, and, like Christ, she become one who helped others in the cause for justice.
To hunger and thirst for righteousness even amid the difficulties of life is a sign of life, of awakening and of awareness. It is an escape from the tendency to despair. It connotes the Eucharistic life of the sacrament, bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ, which illumines and changes those who partake in faith, so that they can become righteous through faith and in cooperation with Jesus Christ overcome even death itself. Physical poverty, grief and every other obstacle, every cross, can become the catalyst for transformation and salvation.
]]>Blessed Are Those Who Mourn: A Christian Understanding Of Grieftag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7956142011-01-04T18:53:27-05:002011-05-25T18:20:30-04:00Eric Simpsonhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-simpson/
As in the case of being materially poor, merely grieving is not virtuous itself, but the end to which it is directed, and the substance of that which we mourn over, imbues our grief with meaning. The primary sign of mourning is weeping, but why do we cry, if we cry?
In the Beatitudes as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus claims, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." This is an outrageous statement on the surface, and even, unless we are fully informed, an apparent contradiction, contrary to our experience of life. Happy are they who grieve?
Some might think that weeping itself is a manipulative trick, a childish ploy and shedding tears can indeed be exactly that. It is disgusting to see the crocodile tears of emotional manipulators -- whether it is done for religious or political purposes by either a Jimmy Swaggart or a Glenn Beck. Such deceit is repugnant to us because true weeping is an act that comes to us in moments of grief that embody the exact opposite of the pretensions of cynics and con artists, actors with ulterior motives who may play it off well and fool the gullible in the public eye, or others who are a little more obvious who may just want to extract sympathy from you and me for some other end. Fake tears turn us off because we intuitively know that real tears embody transparency, humility and the breaking down of walls.
A person who is filled with grief and is weeping and in true mourning is not concerned with what other people think of him, isn't trying to hide behind a mask, or to be involved in the egocentric pursuit of keeping it together. It is at that point of authentic and transparent exposed human personality, the juncture where mutual grief occurs, that we have an opportunity for communion, empathy, love and healing. But I think it is the nature of the ego, speaking of the ego as a false construct that isn't integrated with one's deepest sense of selfhood and is motivated by fear, to be afraid of exposure, afraid of tears, afraid of what others might think, afraid of communion, and afraid of healing, and so we have the cultural trope that describes tears and weeping as weakness. I think we are often deeply afraid of the threat of pain that is a path of healing.
If we do not know how to grieve, there is something unreleased and festering in our psyche, and we become angry; stagnating anger brews depression, and this leads to numbing habits, addictions, the occlusion of real emotion or feeling, constant criticizing of others, strife, endless complaints and a lack of peace.
Jesus speaks words of consolation to those who are in difficult situations or circumstances, who have suffered loss, since no one usually grieves without reason, and again, it turns out that the difficulty itself is the path of salvation. Not only that, but grief is transformed into an interior predisposition that brings us to God, a blessing that has its own implicit promise.
For those who do mourn, weeping itself is not virtuous. We might cry because we are in pain that we have brought upon ourselves, and we feel sorry for ourselves, filled with self-pity, the same kind of despair that sent Judas to his death. Or we might cry because we have insatiable hungers that we can never fill, so we mourn our lack. We might cry because we have no money. Or because we have few friends. We might cry because we can't pay the cable bill. There is weeping that leads to death, as Saint Paul writes to the Corinthians, self-centered sorrow that is really comprised more of fear, anger and bitterness than of grief in its most profound expression. In any case, whatever we grieve over reveals what we value.
So if someone who is poor in spirit mourns, what does she grieve over? What does she value? I think the possibilities are multitudinous in terms of specifics living in a fallen cosmos, a world where the table is never really set and prepared for the meal, but is always constantly being tipped over. There is, simply, a lot over which to mourn. Maybe that state of upendedness, of separation, death, decay and disintegration is the primary root of all authentic grief. Jesus himself embodies the attribute of those who mourn when he mourns death through the death of his friend Lazarus, whom he tells his disciples, is 'sleeping', which seems to be a euphemism that they do not apprehend. The sister of his friend, Martha, comes to him and meets him after he arrives, letting him know that he is too late, that Lazarus has died. Jesus rebukes her softly, and they have an interesting but revealing conversation, as Jesus weeps in the face of death, just as we are called to weep and mourn.
Jesus promises that those who mourn not only their own sins, but the sins of others, will be comforted. There is not only forgiveness for sins, but comfort given. The 19th Century Russian St. Seraphim of Sarov writes,
'"When the Spirit of God comes down to man and overshadows him with the fullness of His inspiration, then the human soul overflows with joy, for the Spirit of God fills with joy whatever He touches. This is that joy of which the Lord speaks in His Gospel: 'A woman when she is in travail has sorrow, because her hour is come; but when she is delivered of the child, she remembers no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world. In the world you will be sorrowful, but when I see you again, your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you' (Jn. 16:21-22). Yet however comforting may be this joy which you now feel in your heart, it is nothing in comparison with that joy of which the Lord Himself by the mouth of His Apostle spoke: 'Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man what God has prepared for them that love Him' (I Cor. 2:9). Foretastes of that joy are given to us now, and if they fill our souls with such sweetness, well-being and happiness, what shall we say of that joy which has been prepared in heaven for those who weep here on earth?"
Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. The person who is poor in spirit mourns over her own sins, the sins of others, and even the fallen condition of the cosmos. In other words, we grieve over the condition of death, the reality of death and decay, and our tears themselves work to cleanse us, to wash us, and to bring us relief. Moreover, Jesus Christ, who has overcome death through His incarnation and His cross, brings us comfort, consolation and joy now, and will bring us laughter in the kingdom of God.
EDIT: A more in-depth version of this article is available via my podcast, Seeking Peace, at Ancient Faith Radio
]]>